I was deep in meditation. I asked, "Is there a plan for my life? What is the plan!?" I heard a voice say "It's in the key of B", and I saw the symbol for a flat in musical notation. The plan for my life is in the key of B flat! I understood this immediately. I have a record of Pete Fountain playing the clarinet. It's a clarinet tuned to the key of B flat. I like to improvise on my guitar along with the record. The plan for my life is: "We're improvising!".

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Monday, September 15, 2014

The missing ancestors of the Cambrian explosion would have been found if they existed.

The Cambrian explosion refers to a period of time 530 million years ago when many animal phyla first appeared on earth. Darwinism predicts that these phyla should have evolved from simpler organisms. If that were true, fossils left by those organisms might provide evidence for their existence. However no such fossils have ever been found. One might suppose that the ancestors of the Cambrian phyla existed but the fossil record is incomplete because conditions at the time were not right for preservation of fossils, or erosion destroyed their fossils, or they did not have shells and their soft tissues did not leave fossils, or their fossils exist but have not yet been found. However, many fossils from before the Cambrian era have been found. In fact, enough precambrian fossils of soft-bodied organisms have been found for the missing ancestors of the Cambrian explosion to have been found if they existed. Therefore the fossil record shows that many animal phyla arose without evolving from simpler organisms. This contradicts the theory of evolution by natural selection but is predicted by intelligent design.

So there is now no shortage of Precambrian fossils. Not only do we have fossils of bacteria, but we also have many fossils of soft-bodied Multicellular organisms. “In the Ediacaran organisms there is no evidence for any skeletal hard parts,” wrote Conway Morris in 1998. “Ediacaran fossils look as if they were effectively soft-bodied” (Crucible of Creation, 28).

That the precursors to the Cambrian groups are indeed missing from the record is widely accepted among paleontologists; thus, this is not the controversial aspect of the ID position. About the missing precursors at the base of the tree of the animal phyla, Valentine notes:

...many of the branches, large as well as small, are cryptogenetic (cannot be traced into ancestors). Some of these gaps are surely caused by the incompleteness of the fossil record..., but that cannot be the sole explanation for the cryptogenetic nature of some families, many
invertebrate orders, all invertebrate classes, and all metazoan phyla.

Charles Marshall concurs:

While the fossil record of the well-skeletonized animal phyla is pretty good, we have virtually no fossils that are unambiguously assignable to the most basal stem groups [putative ancestors] of these phyla, those first branches that lie between the last common ancestor of all bilaterians and the last common ancestor of the living representatives of each of the phyla….their absence is striking. Where are they?

To be clear: Valentine and Marshall, leading paleontologists, oppose ID theory.

Pre-cambrian fossils include:

Charia, which is a single celled algae, originally wrongly thought to be a shelly invertebrate due to more misguided attempts to solve ‘Darwin’s Dilemma.’

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Barghoorn Gunflint microfossils, which again comprise bacterial stromatolites that do not serve as precursors to the Cambrian fauna.

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Bitter Springs Chert, which again are microbe fossils, not clear evolutionary precursors to the Cambrian fauna.

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Saucer-sized organisms, at Ediacara, also called the Ediacaran Fauna, which are enigmatic fossils generally not thought to be ancestral to the Cambrian fauna.

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Followers

Eminent Researchers

Charles Darwin: ... I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

Kurt Gödel: Materialism is false. ... The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived. ... The brain is a computing machine connected with a spirit. ... I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. ... Mind is separate from matter. ... There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

Alan Turing: I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Max Planck (Nobel Prize for Physics): I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel Prize for Physics): Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize for Physics): On the other hand, however, every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble

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I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Brian D. Josephson (Nobel Prize for Physics): What are the implications for science of the fact that psychic functioning appears to be a real effect? These phenomena seem mysterious, but no more mysterious perhaps than strange phenomena of the past which science has now happily incorporated within its scope.

Charles Robert Richet (Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine): 1. There is in us a faculty of cognition that differs radically from the usual sensorial faculties (Cryptesthesia). 2. There are, even in full light, movements of objects without contact (Telekinesis). 3. Hands, bodies, and objects seem to take shape in their entirety from a cloud and take all the semblance of life (Ectoplasms). 4. There occur premonitions that can be explained neither by chance nor perspicacity, and are sometimes verified in minute detail. Such are my firm and explicit conclusions.

Pierre Curie (Nobel Prize for Physics): It was very interesting, and really the phenomena that we saw appeared inexplicable as trickery—tables raised from all four legs, movement of objects from a distance, hands that pinch or caress you, luminous apparitions. All in a [setting] prepared by us with a small number of spectators all known to us and without a possible accomplice. The only trick possible is that which could result from an extraordinary facility of the medium as a magician. But how do you explain the phenomena when one is holding her hands and feet and when the light is sufficient so that one can see everything that happens?

Sir John Eccles (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine): I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.